Scout Identity

A Scout Identity

One night in 1970, Susan Blackmore found herself on the ceiling looking down at her own body.

Blackmore was a freshman at Oxford University, studying psychology and physiology. Like many freshmen in college, she had begun experimenting with drugs and found them mind-opening. But it was that particular trip, during which Blackmore experienced her consciousness leaving her body, floating up to the ceiling, and then soaring around the world, that changed her life.

It had to be paranormal, Blackmore reasoned, proof that there was more to the universe and to human consciousness than mainstream scientists knew. She decided to switch her academic focus to parapsychology in order to obtain scientific evidence of the paranormal phenomena she now believed were real.

Blackmore began pursuing a PhD and spent years running experiments. She tested people for telepathy, for precognition, for clairvoyance. She tried running her experiments with other graduate students; with pairs of twins; with young children. She trained herself in tarot card reading. But nearly every experiment she ran yielded nothing more than chance results.

On the rare occasions when her experiments did yield significant results, she got excited. But then, “as a scientist must,” Blackmore recalls, “I repeated the experiment, checked for errors, redid the statistics, and varied the conditions, and every time either I found the error or got chance results again.” Eventually, she had to face the truth: that she might have been wrong all along, and that perhaps paranormal phenomena weren’t real.

It was a tough truth to face, especially because by that point Blackmore’s whole identity was built around belief in the paranormal. She had trained as a witch and attended Spiritualist churches, wore New Age clothing, used tarot, hunted ghosts. Her friends were incredulous that she was considering “switching sides” to join the skeptics. All the forces of tribalism were pushing her to keep believing.

“But deep down,” Blackmore says, “I was a scientist and always have been. These results were telling me something very loud and clear. I was wrong!”